RoseBlood

Unsuspicious Suspects

Elias puts his hands up dramatically with wide eyes, and I shrug. "Most likely. If there was someone watching, and I think that's pretty likely too, seeing as it got to him that much."

"Do you know which party it was? Who might have been there?" Edith asks me, and I shake my head.

"Anyone with connections to real estate," I tell her. "Some of the guests could have been there, but there would have been a mix of people. I can't say for sure. But it can't have been anyone from their work, because they wouldn't have hidden from the crowd, and Mum or Dad would have recognised them easily."

"The murderer followed them to keep track of them," Emerson says, back to typing. "Maybe they wanted to make Bobby feel a little uneasy. They're convinced that he and she did something, something they might have to pay for with their lives, and he had the apparent chance to remember."

"It would take more than that for my dad," I remark. "But okay. I assume you know everything else about the case?"

"We've gotten background overviews off of all the invited guests to your birthday party," Emerson answers, "after we were forwarded the list made by your parents. Old clients, workmates, basic backgrounds, no motives."

"They're all workaholics," I conclude, closing my casebook. "Mia came because we've been friends for a while now, and the rest of the people my age came because they were brought along by their parents."

"Elizabeth worked for the family, Clarissa Newman is our prime suspect, and a Miss Hayley Lore was out of town, confirmed by Brunsley."

"Which rules her out," I nod, opening my casebook again and writing down her name on a blank page I quickly title Suspects. Then I cross it out, and lean back in my seat with a small sigh.

"What we do now is follow up on any opportunities the guests had," Emerson tells us, putting his iPad down. "The perfect place to get information out of them is at the funeral, where two of us will wait nearby, maybe in the car, and one of us will go in with Holly."

I raise a brow slightly. "Oh, really?"

"It makes sense," Emerson tells me. "Even though Brunsley and some of his colleagues will be around, it'll be good to have a second pair of eyes and ears around. If anyone asks who we are, we're just old friends of Holly's. But only one of us should go."

"You should decide on that, Holly," Edith speaks up, looking at me with a small smile. "Which of us is going in with you?"

I pause, mulling the question over with a slight frown. There's Edith, who has great people skills, and a warm and approachable smile. Elias is joking and casual, easy to be around. And then there's Emerson, with eyes as sharp as mine, and ears that might even catch things that I don't. Might.

Yeah, fine.

"Alright," I say finally, my stare landing on Emerson, who looks patiently back at me. "Emerson?"

Emerson's naturally neutral look wavers, taken aback slightly by my choice. "You want me to go with you?"

I nod. "You know what you're doing."

Emerson stares at me for a long moment, that curious glimmer in his brown eyes reappearing for a while. But all too soon, he nods, and he goes back to being as hard a read as ever.

"That's decided, then."

"We've all got to be really careful tomorrow," Edith points out, her attention shifting between each one of us. "The murderer will probably be there somewhere, and we want to prevent anything like what we interrupted in the garden from happening again. Or worse. Our suspects might not seem... well, suspicious, but they're still suspects."

"In the meantime, we'll go through the forwarded files from Brunsley," Emerson says. "Everything they wrote down, no matter how small, could be something. There is a motive, a deep and dark one, at the root of this whole case, and the deeper and darker it is, the clearer it'll become when we're looking for it."

I still can't picture anyone from the party murdering my parents in cold blood. Well, of course I can't. I've never seen that side of them. A deep and dark side of them... and them being real estate clients and workers. But then there's Clarissa, for all she seems so timid and unaware, who might know something that could make the case a whole lot more complicated, or solve it altogether.

It's then that my phone starts ringing from my pocket.

My brows furrow as I take it out, reading the Caller ID screen, which displays a number I haven't got down in my contacts. I look up at the Tyrels, whose attentions are all caught by the call, and Elias points at it accusingly.

"Might not be a good idea to pick that up. It might track the location or something!"

"No no, hold on," Edith says with a gasp of realisation, "that might be Clarissa! I said that I gave her Holly's number, remember?"

I dither, but end up accepting the call, warily putting it on loudspeaker and holding it away from my face, as if that'd make a difference to anything.

"Who is this?" I question them, my voice as steady and confident as I've ever heard it.

"Holly?" A soft, familiar feminine voice sounds from my phone, their tone worried and breaths shaky with nerves. "I- it's Clarissa."